No matter what your business is, a blog is increasingly being regarded as a necessity. From architecture, to web design, having a blog to talk on your relevant subject matter is a great way to show knowledge and offer tips on your industry.
- You’ll learn more about your industry by blogging. You’ll be forced to continually learn more specific details about your trade, and also find a need to keep your finger on the pulse of newest developments. By blogging about up to the minute topics, search engines will see your blog posts on relevant topics and you’ll actually show up. For example, when Apple does a press conference about a new device, sites like Engadget and Mashable are already talking about it (in some ways live) on their sites.
- An audience will see you as the authority on a subject matter. Do you have inside tips on how to flip realty properties? Well the more you give out this “coveted” information, the more people will visit your site looking for more. And they’ll tell others about your site and blog too. Why? Because the tips you’re providing are practical, and actually work. So going forward, they’ll look to you before even trying Google!
- The ability to engage. What you blog about, people will be able to respond do. Which is nice because for one you get to hear great feedback (good or bad) about what you’re talking about, and also it grows your contact list. These responders will be registered on your site to comment, which gives you their contact information for your newsletters and such.
- To help people. It’s not always about pushing your products and services. It should be more about how you can give back to your community. I think this is a key element because it shows how humble your business is. And if a visitor to your site feels comfortable with you (even having to never have met you), chances are they’ll contact you for services.
- A Social Media hub. As you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites, you link back to your blog on relevant subjects. So if you wrote a new blog post, you should tweet about the subject and link it back to your blog. Same with this the other sites. The hope is that your followers Re-Tweet it, “Like” it, and share it among their friends and followers. This also amplifies your message to lengths that you would otherwise never be able to reach.
- Blogging grows your network. The more you blog and circulate your posts among people on your lists and followers, the more search engines will pick you up in organic searches, and the more visibility your blog will get from people all around the internet.
- Promoting your product and services. Just released some new software that will help save people 30 or more minutes in conversions or calculations? Well put out a press release on your blog about it. Talk about the details, how it works, why it is better than your competition’s software, and how compatible it may be with existing software.
- Compensations. Yes successful blogs do actually make money. Maybe not enough to quit your day job over, but you can make some change by hosting ads on your blog pages. At first it may start with free ad placements from various local or lesser known companies. Eventually as you grow your traffic, you can sell these ad spaces to reputable vendors for their products and services. You’ll want to keep things relevant to your trade and industry.
- RSS and syndication. One of the first things you need to do is setup an RSS so that people can sign up and get your newest posts directly to their RSS readers. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. So that means each time you hit that “publish” button, you readers will get your post directly to their emails, smart phones, and RSS readers almost instantly.
- Because it’s fun. Yes blogging can be fun. I think at first it is seemed as a necessary task, but eventually it becomes something you’ll enjoy doing. Especially when you hear feedback from your readers. The more engaged they become the more you want to provide quality content for them to read and pass along to others.
Do you have some other tips to ad to this? We’d love to hear them in your comments below.
great post, thanks for sharing